Monthly Archives: August 2008

(In contrast to Rear Window. And no, not the new one. The real one). Finally, something current! I picked this one up this very day. That’s right, picked up. It’s expired Fuji Portrait NPS 160, so I had to let someone else do the dirty work, and dirty is the right word because the negatives came back with all sorts of grime dried into the emulsion and the prints are a mess. I won’t name any names (CVS), but as usual I am not impressed. I do slightly like the desaturated and low-contrast look of the expired film, but it’s simply not worth doing when developing is $11 a roll and it’s, well, poor. Shooting digital color really does make sense, especially since I have virtually no control over the color film process and can only hope to make furtive changes to my scans once the damage is done.

This is the same building as this and this.
Fujicolor Portrait NPS 160 shot in the Nikon N75, poorly developed by CVS, and scanned from the print. Quality is obviously job #1 from start to finish with me.

Not my favorite image, but one I still find interesting. I am having a miserable time getting it saturated enoguh to look even close to how it appears on my full version or how it really looked. Something about the conversion and upload is desaturating everyting and I’m not sure why. It’s a problem I’ve had before viewing images in Firefox, and it’s probably related to conflicting colorspaces and my general ignorance about them. I just recently got comfortable with post processing- why not rest on my laurels for a little?

In other news, the Ricoh is out and shooting now that I’m more or less moved in to the new place, so maybe I’ll be able to stop recycling pictures sometime soon and post something really recent. Unfortunately, 36-exp film is not compatible with short attention span and film miserliness. Unfortunately, I think that’s the only way T-Max comes (in 35mm of course). Atl east once I develop it I’ll feel confident enough handling it to develop my recent DC trip pictures, which I have been terrified of ruining (one roll Tri-X, which I’m not worried about, and one roll of T-Max which is apparently weird). Maybe those will make it to here sooner or later.

Shot with my Pentax digital SLR setup some time early this summer. It’s in the EXIF, so I’m sure you can find the date if you’re curious. I’m not.

This is from my first-ever roll of color film, at least since I was ten or so. I started shooting film when my digital body was back for warranty repairs, and this is how I came to shoot various types of film.

While my pictorial review of the stages of my photography was amusing (to me), it has left this page devoid of color for a few days, and it seems like time for a change. Additionally, it seems logical to explain the little picture that appears next to my name. Here it is:

This was taken the same day and less than five hundred feet from where this one was photographed. Treated similarly, it has similar mega-saturated tones and is, at least to me, pleasing, overwhelming, and repulsive at the same time. Which gets boring. It also reflects my recent fascination with square crops. A very similar scene with a friend and girlfriend (the same pair chronicled in the other post from this location) sitting on a bench looking over the beach became a Christmas present from him to her. It also took me close to a year to recover the printing cost- can’t beat mixing friends and business,
Shot over a year ago using my new (at the time) digital SLR system.

Here’s a shot from the first roll of film I developed myself. I was wandering around the house trying to shoot a roll as fast as I could so I could try out the developing, and here’s how one of the frames came out. I was really surprised at how foolproof it seemed. Many of the mistakes I made seemed like they could ruin a roll, but it was surprisingly resilient.

Agfa APX 400 shot in an N75 (for maximum efficiency when trying to get through the roll as fast as possible). Experimented with a few different lighting sources using the lamps on the table.

Well, I guess today it makes sense to continue along my progression to the final step: True black and white film photography. Yesterday’s rant should provide ample explanation if what is and is not to love about the C-41 stuff, and after a few rolls of that I felt the need to try the real thing. A lot of Googling brought me to a basic understanding of how to develop one’s own film, and so I took the plunge and ordered chemicals, accessories, and 20 rolls of real live black and white film for a total of about $79, or about the cost of shooting and developing eight rolls of C-41 black and white.

Secure in the knowledge that I would soon possess the necessary skills to develop it, I bought and began shooting real live black and white film (living in the middle of nowhere for work meant that I had to make many phone calls and drive twenty miles to find any, and all that was available was T-Max. I’d like to take this opportunity to give a big shout-out to The Film Center of Altoona, PA not only for explaining to me that no one uses film anymore and everything is digital now, but also for failing to realize the irony of calling their operation “The Film Center.” If you know film isn’t dead, why don’t you give them a call at 814-946-3648 and ask if they have any Tri-X?). I shot one roll of T-Max 400 and one roll of Tri-X 400 on the summer program’s trip to Washington D.C. (I probably should have been paying more attention to my students and less to my light meter and circular polarizer, but so be it).

The package arrived at my house the day after I returned home from the summer program. I loaded up a roll of film (re-branded Agfa APX 400, but that’s another story), shot through it as fast as I could, gathered my supplies together and worked some chemical magic in my sink. Sure enough, once I fixed and rinsed, I had a three-foot strip of little tiny reversed pictures! I was thrilled that it had worked, so I loaded up a roll in my manual camera and went back to work.

I think this shot is from my second roll. It’s Agfa APX 400 shot at 400 and developed in Clayton F76+, an excellent low-toxicity hypoallergenic liquid developer (I also have more to say about low-tox chemicals- stay tuned). The image you see here was scanned from the negative at Target (more about that later too) and lightly corrected, and it will be printed as a 5 x 7 for a birthday present. Chasing a skittish animal around with a manual-exposure manual-focus camera is a bizarre and difficult experience, but I’m pleased with the results.